Rent Vortex (2021)

Interesting Look At Dementia - Vortex review by GI

Director Gaspar Noé, usually a filmmaker who pushes boundaries, has here made a restrained film about dementia although there is something pitiless in his depiction of an old couple struggling to cope. Coé uses a split screen technique throughout the film to highlight the separation that the two protagonists experience as the wife (Françoise Lebrun) becomes more affected by her growing dementia. The struggles her husband (Dario Argento) has in coping as she wanders off or leaves the gas on and at one point destroys his notes for a book on which he is working highlight the frustration that close loved ones often face. There's a grimness to the presentation of the overly cluttered apartment that the two seem to aimlessly drift through in their day to day existence and Noé creates, at times, some striking imagery especially in the juxtaposition of the two screen images. Similarities with Amour (2012) and The Father (2020) are inevitable and, for me at least, those are better films that deal with the issue of dementia as this film seems at times to be unsympathetic or almost cruel in the way it is treated. This was exemplified in the depiction of the couple's inept drug addict son (Alex Lutz). But the film is not without its merits and although I found it a little too long it's worth checking out.